She (Christy Clark) hinted at the shift (to 'review' the $ 6 milion dollar RailGate Coffin Nail) during an interview with Bill Good on radio station CKNW Thursday morning. (Attorney-General Barry) Penner made it official in a series of media interviews in the afternoon.

The review will be conducted by an outsider with legal expertise, identity yet to determined, said Penner.

*Of course, for this bunch really, really doing something about a thing so many of them have been implicated in actually means doing.... Well.....Absolutely nothing (except to serve up yet another media inoculation for the bamboozled).

Next up, if I can keep from succumbing to my cynicism completely, I will explain, once again, why Gary Mason really just may be the real reincarnation of Ron Obvious....And if I do so, I will also do my best to explain why Justine Hunter is now known, by this blogger at least, to be a 'friendly'. And whatever you do, stay away from Chichester Cathedral when reading anything generated by the BellGlobeCTVTSNCHUMRDSMUCHTEAMPickleBreath media organ grinders.

We stopped at the Temple of Green Goddess Lesserness next door to get a tall dark for me and a small hot chocolate-with-whipped-up-gunk-on-top for her.

And then, as we were walking back towards the VW(notso)Microbus, me with the couple of coins I got back from the tenner I used to have jingling in my pocket, her with a brand new milk moustache, she told me something that stopped me in my tracks.

Because.

It turns out our good friend K., who had taken littler e. to Tap that day because C. was home sick with a wicked flu/strep throat double-whammy, had stopped at an even schmancier place somewhere back in CremeVille to get them both Chai Lattes.

I tried my best not to react.

Really, I did.

But in the end I just couldn't help myself.

****

After we crossed Hastings at Slocan and I blurted out something about slippery slopes, littler e. gave me that 'Here we go again' eyebrow lift thing that both my kids (quite rightly) use at least 25 times a day.

Then, because littler e. is so good at shrugging off just about anything, we actually had some fun with math figuring out how much the average grad student in my lab spends at Starbucks annually.

The number we came up with, conservatively, was $2,500.

****

Now.

In my own defense, I actually make my own coffee, in my office, twice every weekday.

I used to have a pot on all the time.

Then, for a while, I went with a french press.

But I had to stop all that when I realized that my adenosine A2 receptors were so jammed with caffeine-crack-traffic that they were turning my autonomic nervous system CSheenCrazy by 3 o'clock every afternoon.

So these days I use the drip, because the volume and the caffeine dose are both relatively finite.

As is the expense.

But.

I would be lying to you if I did not explain that I often fall off the wagon on weekends.

The rationalization I use in my brain is that I want to go faster so that I can get out of the lab as soon as possible, while the sun is still up. That way I can head off to do stuff like this.

And yesterday morning, Saturday, I found myself standing in the Temple nearest the lab right behind a guy with one of those novella-length orders that leads to 10 minutes of sharpie-scribbling on the side of the cups by the kid behind the till.

To be very clear, this thing with Starbucks's music label is something that Bigger E. and I have 'discussed' (with her eyebrow raised) before....It started with the Dylan Gaslight thing and then went to a higher plane of forehead wrinkling when I saw Josh Ritter on that bloody counter...Clearly, I am mighty conflicted with my own bad buying behaviour...Her point was that good music is just that...And, those that are good have to make a living at it somehow....Damn...I hate it when my kids prove me wrong (but not really)...

By the way....Bigger E and me do pretty damned fine version of this back-to-back with this in the very same key, most often at Trout Lake North on Sunday afternoons.

Finally, there is a place up the street from our house (that is right across the street from a GreenTemple) that I go to every time I'm in that area for the Americanos and, even better, for the Fritters... And, here's the best part....I get a bill AND coins back from my tenner when I get one of each....